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Reddit can't build a better search engine

• amelius 5y ago
  FOSS can't build a better search engine either.
• cc101 5y ago
  The idea of reddit building competent software is hard to take seriously. I am appalled every time I try to buy an ad. Those folks have no idea what they are doing. Rank amateurs.
  • ALittleLight 5y ago
    There is a Mark Zuckerberg quote about twitter, something like "Twitter is a clown car that fell into a gold mine." I often think that about reddit, minus the gold mine.
• nemothekid 5y ago
  >I was too young to use Google when it first got started This statement aged me 10 years
  • jhatemyjob 5y ago
    Yeah that one was weird. But then I thought about it and I didn't either. I don't think I started using Google until like 2004.
• trinovantes 5y ago
  Building a good search engine is hard It gets worse if the content you're trying to index are labeled with the same titles like "me_irl". While they're usually just pointless memes, there are occasionally a few gems that I would like to find again to share with friends but it's basically impossible with such poor signals. I think it's a bit sad that those rare gems are essentially lost and forgotten.
• themodelplumber 5y ago
  Thanks for posting op, it's interesting to think about. > Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge. I would offer a bit of a different perspective here, I think maybe even most do it for what you could call self-soothing. For example, a lot of people share knowledge, but it's _their knowledge_, which can also be defined as _sharing their subjective past_ and that's known to be a very soothing thing for people who may even be troubled by the unknown in their personal lives. Hop online, boom, you're a domain expert in your own past. Find a place that's _about your past_, be it /r/linux or /r/formula1 or whatever, and there you go, it's comfy. You generally get an upvote + reply vibes dopamine bonus just for being there, due to your relevant past. So, Reddit's sooth-sayers (so to speak) are kind of lazy but incentivized-lazy in some ways, which I think can also speak to some issues with the platform surrounding cognitive blind spots and what some here have called the echo chamber effect. That's an opportunity for a new search engine, in some ways, but it also may offer insights to new services that could be even more effective. > And there is no financial incentive associated with it. [posting on Reddit] There is though. I mean I've myself been financially incentivized into doing it, as have probably many, many others. Nothing sneaky, even. You've got people posting their stuff all over the place, and the more community or indie or niche it is, the more welcomed is the post-as-advertisement or comment-as-advertisement. And that's not even going into corporate efforts to operate on the platform, which can be very subtle. > However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, Perhaps--but Google was _really_ good for a very long time. That was worth a lot to millions of people. I like to think that in the future, an ecosystem-mindset toward incentive systems could really help, like planning for different emergent systems that incentivize good results. Anyway, fun to think about, thanks again.
  • powersnail 5y ago
    > I would offer a bit of a different perspective here, I think maybe even most do it for what you could call self-soothing. > > For example, a lot of people share knowledge, but it's _their knowledge_, which can also be defined as _sharing their subjective past_ and that's known to be a very soothing thing for people who may even be troubled by the unknown in their personal lives. Hop online, boom, you're a domain expert in your own past. Find a place that's _about your past_, be it /r/linux or /r/formula1 or whatever, and there you go, it's comfy. You generally get an upvote + reply vibes dopamine bonus just for being there, due to your relevant past. That's a bit too psycho-analytical. A lot of what gets shared on technical/domain-expertise subs are simply technical knowledge. Most posts on such subs are questions, and upvoted comments are typically answers. If you accuse people of feeling good about helping others with their knowledge, well, I'd say that the joy is well-earned by the generous act. In fact, if we are talking about the exhilaration of being upvoted, it's much easier to farm karma on reddit by lying. There are many big subs that are purely made up stories.
• not2b 5y ago
  This is exactly right: if Reddit ever decided to build a search engine they'd wind up destroying their site, because everyone would try to game the results and fill Reddit with crap to do it. The point it is that search engines are adversarial: people who are skilled and determined are actively trying to replace good results with their results.
  • new_guy 5y ago
    This is a good point I'd never considered before. The better your search, the more people will try to game it, the worse your results will get.
    • MichaelMoser123 5y ago
      yes, however there is an element of real feedback: if an subreddit turns out to be garbage, then people will choose a different subreddit with a different moderation policy. It is possible to prioritize by number of point or by some dynamics over the popularity of an subreddit - that would incorporate this feedback.
    • kibwen 5y ago
      You (and the OP) are echoing Goodhart's Law, which describes one of the reasons that I've lost faith in the wisdom of markets.
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      I've seen people game bad search engines just the same.
  • Barrin92 5y ago
    one advantage that reddit has is that its content is community moderated. People may have an incentive to game search, but communities have an incentive to keep the content authentic. Not to mention that Reddit as a platform also has some means to restrict spam accounts. Google if it does this sort of clean-up at all has to do so algorithmically which is kind of shoddy. Reddit basically gets a human workforce for free, so I'm not so sure the comparison holds.
• Finnucane 5y ago
  But the practice of appending 'reddit' to your Google search isn't depending on Reddit building a better search engine. It's using Google's search engine, and trying to direct it to a database that you hope has the answer you're looking for. So there's that. Of course, if that practice became widespread, then people could still try to stuff Reddit posts with junk in the hope that it gets picked up by Google in these searches, and then the Reddit folks would have to try to filter that out.
  • rukshn 5y ago
    There was a post, which trended on HN yesterday (2000+ upvotes) that stated Reddit is sitting on a gold mine and they can build a better search engine because people are appending 'reddit' at the end of it. This is a response to the original post, explaining why the logic behind is it false.
    • zuminator 5y ago
      Frankly I don't really see the logic. You're failing to disambiguate "generally better" with "better for Reddit inc" or "better for redditors," which are all separate things. That is, I'm not convinced that a Reddit search engine would necessarily be subject to the same level of gaming, for a variety of reasons: * Reddit groups are moderated in a way that "THE INTERNET" as a whole isn't. * Reddit is a destination in itself. It's not like Google, which is a means to arrive at various destinations. * A Reddit search engine just has to index Reddit. It can do things like entirely filter out clickable external links, which would make SEO much less fruitful. * Reddit is dependent on being an effective conversational watercooler. For financial reasons, it's not going to allow itself to become filled with the same level of cruft as the entire web is. This is somewhat evidenced by the difference between Reddit and Usenet. Compared with how Usenet quickly devolved into an unmanageable morass with the advent of spam, Reddit has managed to stay fairly legible. (BTW off topic but personally I think this whole post could've just been a comment subthread in the original post. Of course we all want our ideas to bubble to the top. But if everybody started a whole new thread every time they thought they had something REALLY IMPORTANT to say that shouldn't be ignored, then every large thread would give birth to dozens of baby threads and make HN less effective overall. On the other hand, I see someone else thanked you for putting this in a separate "breakout room" so to speak, so what do I know? Cheers.)
• lamontcg 5y ago
  > I was too young to use Google when it first got started, but according to many, in the beginning, Google had better or more accurate search results. One reason for this was the fact that most of the sites back then were indie websites, which did not care about SEO and money and created websites for sharing information. > But I think all can agree that Google results reduced when people started to game the algorithm and create search engine optimized garbage websites. Well not quite. There were piles of SEO crap sites being produced in 2001. Google used to manage to react to any new exploit and improve their results. They actively fought that battle for at least a decade or so. They used to win. It is only more recently that they seem to have given up.
  • nemothekid 5y ago
    >It is only more recently that they seem to have given up. They haven't given up; the OP has a point. The "sites" you are hoping for Google to return _don't exist_. Any website online right now that doesn't exist to drive ad revenue is exceedingly rare. In 2001, there were way more websites that existed just for fun; any tom, dick and harry could open up note pad and get a website online. That doesn't exist anymore. It's my opinion that those who complain about Google search results are frustrated that Google can no longer find a web that no longer exists
    • jamjamjamjamjam 5y ago
      Because its simply not possible. There are too many barriers now. You need to get a static ip for one. Domains cost more. Email for those domains costs quite a bit. And your friends are far less likely to visit since theyre all addicted to infinite scrolling websites
    • 14 5y ago
      No. There still are forums on lots of topics. But search how to fix X and instead of prioritizing a forum site with answers you get 5 top results trying to sell you the parts to fix X. The answers are always way down the list.
      • 5y ago
• rasz 5y ago
  >Reddit can't build a better search engine Reddit cant build any search functionality whatsoever. Current search is so broken It cant even find my own posts.
• notRobot 5y ago
  Reddit doesn't really need to build a search engine, they could just have an algolia instance like HN does: https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/. While not perfect, it does a pretty good job, in my experience. However, the article makes a valid point -- the moment people start using it heavily, we'll get a reddit comment equivalent of SEO, with keyword stuffing and whatnot.
  • danuker 5y ago
    I absolutely love the HN Algolia search. I am amazed by its sheer speed, and that it does exactly what you'd expect, lets you sort by popularity and filter by time, and does no neural-network-deep-learning-garbage query rewriting. I'm thankful for its existence, and I hope they get plenty of clients due to this HN demo of their power. I hope they can afford to keep it alive forever. I use it instead of the " reddit" suffix in Google, usually HN has what I'm interested in, and in any case has much higher signal-to-noise ratio.
  • bduerst 5y ago
    Algolia was the first thing I though about when the post was made yesterday. I commented this elsewhere but I don't think Reddit wants a good search option. Users tend to repost a non-trivial amount of content/questions/etc., and if those users could find the original content with a better search, it's likely reddit would see less user engagement.
• FL410 5y ago
  Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge. … So how can we fix the system? The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge OK, so append Reddit to the google search, got it.
• johnny35 5y ago
  This take doesn't make any sense to me. > Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments > are doing it to share their knowledge. And there is no financial incentive > associated with it. They know that do it to share their knowledge. Ok, that's why people are Googling for "xyz reddit"... > However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that > there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, > people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are > now. SEO stuffed websites. There's nothing in this article explaining how the existence of better search on Reddit would provide different incentives than the very popular search engine for Reddit that is being used today (Google). What is this "financial opportunity" that doesn't already exist that will spell doom?
• Nowado 5y ago
  Marketer perspective: you can not build a communication tool you find useful that won't end up being used to make money. It will get figured out. I could go into a bit more philosophical angle with reterritorialization done by capital, but I think it's much simpler to consider the following: between politics (where once any division in population is found, it becomes valuable instantly), classical business marketing (where once anyone makes purchasing decision informed by something, it becomes valuable), capital markets (where once anything can be used to predict anything about any company or asset class, it becomes valuable) and more personal scams (where once you figure out someone's niche interest, it becomes valuable) there just isn't anything left. Go ahead, try to find something. Reddit is being constantly targeted. I still use it, because what else?, but if the method isn't obvious, here's what you do: you are hired by/own small company making niche potato chips dip sold via Amazon. You go to google keywords and check 'potato chips dip', you google all you can find there and some of your ideas, you write down all top10 results and check every now and then (well, your SEO monitoring app does it for you). Whatever you find that allows for user input, you generate that input - accounts are cheap - and maybe do some external SEO (thus beating 99,9% of social media results online). That's it, it's easy. What Reddit (and any mildly aware SM company) does, is they try to offer marketers access to audience for a price that's lower than cost of what I just described. There will be edge cases, especially on international markets where value of time for various business owners differs vastly, which will lead to sites slowly getting more clogged up with ads, but that's the general gist. If you can imagine using similar method to get in front of your eyes when you're looking for something, then it would just be quite weird if nobody ever did it.
  • yanmaani 5y ago
    What if you explicitly target it with respect to the money? Most of the crap on Google is going to be monetized sites. If you just block/downrank all the sites with e.g. ads, then the profit motive for spam goes down - the more value you extract, the less value you are able to extract.
    • Nowado 5y ago
      It's an improvement, even though it's going to be gamed as well. That said, I have no idea how you would do it. More specifically, 1) I see almost everything as an ad, 2) you're going to get an extremely biased internet and logistics/technicalities of the project are hellish. 1) you downgrade all blogs with ads. All journalism (if they advertise their own stuff that's still profit motive and ad, right?) and all company blogs. All social media (that have over 100mln users right now). Also all blogs that are meant to promote author as an authority to get them gigs down the road, I'm guessing. You will be left with more overt PR and 2) organizations who can afford to not have profit motive in any form. That's just unsustainable for almost everything. NGOs are still asking for donations. That's going to be mostly politically motivated messaging and tiny % of people who can afford to just post for free cause they like to (god forbid they lose that position and setup patreon). Audience allows for attaching marketing, and that allows to attach all content production to business (and other cases I mentioned). Again, I like the idea in principal, but 'lets just get the money out of the system' was tried in many different contexts and the same structural issues resurface.
• ddtaylor 5y ago
  > However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are now. SEO stuffed websites. I help run a Reddit website and open source project for managing scheduled posts [1] and we see a lot of garbage there, sadly. Over the years the site has processed nearly half a million posts and has tens of thousands of registered Redditors. In the early days it was pretty cool, we had a lot of individual users with various interesting projects. I remember early on there were some musicians using it and a few book authors that would release their books one chapter at a time - using our service to schedule the posts so they didn't have to do it manually. But, as time went on, the entire platform has been just swamped with mostly live sex workers and people shilling bullshit products. I'm not judging the sex workers or saying they shouldn't be allowed on the platform and we don't ban them, but I would say now literally 99/100 of new users are just trying to push their Only Fans accounts to porn subreddits. Regarding the weird product shills, we've seen a few really odd campaigns. There was one guy who would post to various left-leaning and "green" oriented subreddits on the terrible nature of plastics while also promoting his own metal straw sales. Again, none of it is illegal and I'm not even sure if any of it is unethical or immoral since it really depends on if you think people are doing these things in bad faith, etc. Either way, the project has for sure taken a backseat for us. If the server stays up and everything works, cool, if not, that's fine too. I have no interest in trying to monetize the service anymore whereas in the early days we took donations. My point is the world of gamifying and commercializing Reddit content is already very very well established and there are large players doing it at a very large scale. If you measure it the porn industry is virtually all of it, but if you exclude them and look a bit harder you'll find other industries that have also carved out their niche in exploiting the platform. [1]: https://cronnit.com https://cronnit.com
  • notRobot 5y ago
    Why don't you guys add a flat monthly/one-time usage fee?
    • ddtaylor 5y ago
      Accepting payment for this kind of service is actually quite problematic. Even more so now that the vast majority of the userbase is Only Fans creators. I'm not saying it should be like that, but if you've ever tried to accept payments for anything "high risk" it's a nightmare. For example, Stripe won't allow any of it at all. It's blacklisted in multiple ways through their restricted services.
• zemo 5y ago
  > Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge. people post to Reddit (and here) not to share their knowledge but because they get a little squirt of dopamine from upvotes and downvotes and replies.
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    I find that most people on this site use it to engage in discussion, to learn and to teach if they think they have something of value to say. For the most part, you're right about Reddit these days. When I used that site I'd check votes every time I was done scrolling. This site I check threads to see if anyone responded to me with anything I'd like to reply to.
• nicolasmelo12 5y ago
  Although this article has many valid points, it's important to say that Reddit is mostly used by english speakers. (Maybe 1/3 of the world, i think that probably less). I'm a software developer and i think that most of the time i prefer websites like stack overflow or github issues directly. As a software developer i see that reddit answers most questions like "Is it better to use A over B?", "Why using C can be bad for my code?". It's for questions that are more open and less exact or technical. So yeah, i don't see reddit being used as a search engine because english speakers are not even half of the world and it definitely don't answers most daily basis questions.
• conjecTech 5y ago
  This thesis is off. It's not as if Reddit just appeared on the internet yesterday. It's been a place people look for this kind of info for a long time, and people have been trying to game it for just as long. And it already has a good search engine - that just happens to be Google. So it still leaves the question: why does Reddit still have such a high signal-to-noise ratio. A few things I've noticed: 1. A lot of conversations happen before that many people are interested. Subreddits tend to attract mavens, and they often discuss things months or years before people really care (or the marketing team for whatever is being discussed is even looped in). Pay attention to when the posts you're looking at occurred. In a lot of cases, they were there earlier than you'd expect. 2. There is incredible dispersion in where conversations on a topic occur. It's not uncommon to have 10s or 100s of different communities discussing the same thing, and its not clear which is going to end up being the place people trust. Many of the sub-communities are also somewhat mutually exclusive(geography, android vs ios, etc), meaning it's going to look incredibly insincere if the same account is posting in a bunch of them. 3. Reddit posts allow negative feedback in a way few other venues due, especially not pages optimized for SEO and controlled by a single entity. 4. It is one of the few platforms with an appetite for long-form content. It is almost an anti-Twitter. Meaningfully moving a Reddit discussion on a single popular post could take hours if it could be done at all. For communities with more lasting artifacts like a wiki, it could be practically impossible. 5. As others have pointed out, the subreddits aren't controlled by and don't have the same incentives as Reddit Inc. Optimization tools aren't going to generalize well since what it takes to get to the top of each is different.
  • pojzon 5y ago
    Recently have noticed a business creating fictional threads on reddit (multiple on different communities) working as an AD to sell something. Example: „What is the cheapest best cooling for cpu now?” All discussions point to product that more experienced users know its crap. But still the wrong product is at the top with most (botted) upvotes. Companies realized that ppl look for opinions on reddit -> that created demand for those services -> bots companies implemented new strategy. Its getting very very hard to get honest expert opinion. Seems like the only way now is to belong to specific closed communities.
• nitwit005 5y ago
  The payoff of doing SEO probably wouldn't be anywhere near what it is for Google search. I suspect many reddit users don't know it has a search feature, or tried it exactly once. The basic usage is scrolling through posts. No matter how good their search becomes, the thing you'd want to optimize is presumably be getting onto people's front page.
• superfrank 5y ago
  I've said it before and I'll say it again... I think building better search goes against everything Reddit wants to be. Reddit doesn't want to be Google or Wikipedia. Reddit wants to be a mix between Discord, TikTok, and Instagram. The redesign they did years ago pushed a more Instagram like design. Things like chat and rPan are meant to keep you on the site interacting with other users in real time. Their new video player is just a TikTok rip off. They give away awards every day and started pushing award karma in hopes that you'll give them to other users. Reddit wants you on their site, interacting with other users in real time and building a better search goes against that goal. If I'm looking for a new pair of boots, there's two paths I can take on the reddit site. I can search "best boots" or I can go make a post on /r/boots. If their search is fantastic and I find a post that's 2 years old, there may be some great information there, but I'm probably not going to comment. Even if I do comment, I'm probably not going to get a lot of responses. If their search is shit (intentionally or unintentionally) it pushes me toward making my own post and drives up their engagement metrics. It would be a massive undertaking to improve their search and there's very little incentive. Reddit wants users who just want to browse and that's not what the users coming in from a specific Google search are doing.
  • thematrixturtle 5y ago
    There is massive incentive, since Google earns over $50B per quarter selling ads to people who want to buy stuff. Targeting these queries effectively would be hugely more valuable than my current ad selection of increasingly desperate shitcoin/NFT shilling and pleas to buy Reddit gold.
    • nefitty 5y ago
      It would be even more amazing if ads were stuck exclusively on search result pages. That would minimize the interruption while maximizing the reevance of targeted ads, with minimal tracking needs.
    • superfrank 5y ago
      I disagree. Reddit already has more than enough information to effectively target users. Just because they aren't doing it well right now, doesn't mean they need a new approach. The subreddits you spend your time on is basically just you classifying your interests for Reddit. I'd argue that knowing that someone spends 1-2 hours a day scrolling through hiking subreddits is just as much of an indicator of their interests that any combination of Google searches. Reddit basically has access to all the information that Google ties to get through 3rd party cookies, except they get it way easier since you're never leaving their platform. They know where you're going, how long you're there, and even if you like or dislike the content (upvotes and downvotes). I'm sure their targeting could be improved with search, but like I said in my first post, I think that's a lot of effort for a small improvement.
• didip 5y ago
  I still remembered Panda change they made in 2011. It is vividly burned in my memory because I used to work for one of those trash website that polluted Google search results. When Panda came out, I was like… what took you so long (also, time to get a new job). For whatever reason, Google is too shy to pull that move again. Just imagine, Pinterest could easily be obliterated in one random day.
• thematrixturtle 5y ago
  This is too dismissive. Reddit users and communities have history, links, upvotes etc, which is hugely valuable, and it should be possible to implement a PageRank-type system to separate the signal from the noise and surface the most valuable results. Now that noise is still considerable, thanks to karma farming etc (did you know you can buy and sell Reddit accounts?), but humans can usually tell apart the shills from the legit posters and automating this doesn't seem unsurmountable if Reddit cared. Which, oddly, they don't seem to.
• CSSer 5y ago
  This is a weird article to me. I somehow agree with the conclusion but disagree with all of its points. Unless my memory is failing me (possible, it’s late), it straw mans the article it’s referencing by implying Reddit would want to do something like that anyway. It also fails to offer a compelling narrative for what makes Reddit good to me because frankly, and I feel that a lot of people seem to be overlooking this here too, Reddit has plenty of its own problems. Reddit is owned by Condé Nast and is largely used as a content mill to prop up its existing properties. Reddit is dominated by the Pareto principle. 80% of its content is generated by a very small subset of users. Reddit doesn’t have the best track record for free expression. Many subreddits have crazy moderators that volunteer for some Machiavellian rush and use their power to stifle or twist the narrative of public sentiment. Reddit doesn’t want to kill the golden goose, so when this kind of controversy arises or when controversial subreddits crop up they kill it with fire to protect their investment. Lastly, Reddit users more than half a decade ago were already lambasting the amount of corporate shilling and guerilla advertising that takes place on Reddit daily. A lot of this is, in fact, orchestrated by those users I mentioned who produce 80% of the content because yes, they have discovered a financial incentive to do so. I wouldn’t deny that Reddit has any sincere users any more than I would deny that we have any sincere users here (I’m certainly not getting paid for this), but I’ve been a bit perturbed by the amount of whitewashed, positive vibes Reddit seems to be getting around here lately. I stick Reddit on the end of search queries too, but I feel like I still wade into results with a similar level of skepticism to that which I carry around most of the rest of the web.
• ALittleLight 5y ago
  When I append "reddit" to a search term for something it's because I'm looking for the opinions of mavens. For example, I needed a flashlight recently and rather than just buy the first flashlight on Amazon I instead searched "flashlight reddit", found the subreddit for flashlight enthusiasts, scanned their wiki and posts about what to buy and then just bought what seemed like their top recommendation for my usecase. It took a few minutes more, but now, I don't just have a flashlight, I have a flashlight that people who care about flashlights think is a good flashlight. I think the reason reddit building a better search engine wouldn't help them is that it's already pretty darn easy to just add "reddit" to a search and, at least for me personally, I don't do it that often. Typing "reddit" at the end of my search seems a lot easier and faster than going to reddit and typing my query into their search. Also, contrary to the blog post, I think people have always tried to game both search results and make money on reddit.
• zagrebian 5y ago
  Reddit can’t even make a rich text editor for comments that isn’t borked in browsers.
• 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  Google is an advertising company. So it makes sense that their search engine (and youtube) exist as a platform for advertising. It really is that simple. Reddit don't want people to be able to easily find information. They want to make it just easy enough that you wont leave but hard enough that it will take you longer to find what you need. They are all about retention and finding that balance between aggravation and engagement. Twitter is the same.
• webkike 5y ago
  Then ban the people gaming the system
• pictur 5y ago
  When I saw the reddit example, I thought of quora. Quora will never be a search engine because all users need to stand out is to add something. and what is usually added is garbage.
• caaqil 5y ago
  > However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are now I mean, you don't have to imagine this, it already happens. People do game Reddit to inject ads, create bots that farm karma then use it to post their content and get them to the front page, etc. The only problem is that (at least some) redditors are incredibly sensitive to this and will go full internet detectives on you. See /r/HailCorporate.
• boatsie 5y ago
  I think this article misses the fact that Google polices spam/seo hacks via software automation whereas Reddit (in theory) polices it via crowdsourcing and moderators. These volunteers are super vigilant as they seem to treat the subreddits as their turf or property. If we could downvote google results and share those with others, that would be closer.
• sb057 5y ago
  This misses the mark, Reddit's search is completely useless for any sort of query, and has been for at least a decade. Searching for a post's title verbatim but without quotes will frequently return completely unrelated results. That combined with the fact that Reddit constitutes something like 90% of downtime of top 10 global websites and that their video player is, by all accounts, terrible, tells me they have institutional technical problems.
• mdoms 5y ago
  This argument makes precisely zero sense. We've already established that people are using site:reddit.com in search queries so the incentive already exists. And frankly Reddit is already at least 50% astro turfed. But search results on Reddit are still more useful for many queries. It's also worth noting that unlike Google, Reddit has total control over the content that they're indexing. If they detect bad SEO actors they have far more power to influence them or shut them down completely because they're indexing a platform they control. Google is indexing the open web.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  "However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are now. SEO stuffed websites." Reddit already has a "search engine" to search reddit.com. People used to call this "site search". As Google became popular, some websites gave up on site search and outsourced it to Google. Nevertheless, plenty of websites still have their own search engine. They do not use Google. AFAICT, Reddit does not use Google for site search. Let's put the premise in the author's title to the test. Someone suggest some search terms. We will then search (a) using Reddit's site search and (b) using Google search with "site:reddit.com". We can then compare the results from (a) and (b).
  • ashtuchkin 5y ago
    Reddit does have its own search engine, it's just bad. The premise in the author's post is that as soon as it becomes "good", the SEO optimizators will ruin it in the same way they ruined Google search.
• skilled 5y ago
  As someone who appends "Reddit" to his Google queries - SEO spammers have already caught up on this trend. I've seen it on several occasions that some blog site will have the word "Reddit" in the title.
  • chrizel 5y ago
    That’s why you should use ‘site:reddit.com’ in your search query to only get results from this domain.
    • shpx 5y ago
      I make custom search engines for this. In Chrome, go to Settings -> Search engine -> Manage search engines -> Other search engines -> Add, then add this Search engine: Reddit through Google Keyword: r URL with %s in place of query: {google:baseURL}search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s After that you just type "r best electric bicycle" in the top bar and it'll turn that into "site:reddit.com best electric bicycle". I also have n {google:baseURL}search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%s w https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s wk https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%s u https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%s l https://libgen.is/search.php?req=%s a {google:baseURL}search?q=site%3Aarxiv.org+%s t https://thepiratebay.org/search/%s/0/99/0 and a bunch more I never use. The LibGen one isn't great because it sometimes breaks if they get kicked off their TLD. I worry that someone could snag the domain after they get kicked off and I wouldn't notice, but that's a bit too paranoid. Then I also have p {google:baseURL}search?q=site:docs.python.org%2F3%2F+%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky which goes straight to the first search result using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature (turns out that's what that button was for), but in order to avoid having to click through a redirect notice, you need to install (at your own risk) the "Redirect Google Redirects" extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-google-redirects/nlacgjiklmjjejlgoclnjhndjaiempdo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-google-re...
      • chrizel 5y ago
        For Hacker News I always use https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com - it has more specific sorting and filtering options. Besides HN itself it is one of my main bookmarks because I search for Hacker News discussions all the time when checking out new technology.
• halotrope 5y ago
  Despite all of its drawbacks like the obnoxious mobile app pushing and deterioration of communities after they pass a certain size it is still the closest equivalent I know of for the early 2000's forum culture. It is the only social network I know (apart from HN) that does not exclusively deals in bite-sized dopamine hits. Lets hope that the upcoming IPO does not compromise the incentives there.
  • kumarvvr 5y ago
    Agreed, but it doesn't have to. It is addictive as hell. I guess, if you own facebook, you track daily stats and percentages and convert them into insights like "how long are people on the site" or "how many ads to posts ratio do people experience" and FB optimizes for that. I guess, Reddit is still growing enough that it does not have to do such analysis and take any action. Also, the fundamental structure of reddit is different. People search out for sub-reddits and choose to be in them. The dynamic is different. Even in FB, those who spend time in groups, will feel different than browsing through profile posts. While FB is a chore, reddit is an acquired taste. Another important thing I have noticed is that, conversations in reddit, the majority of them, revolve around internet events (a blog post, a picture, an upload, a tweet, a news item, a real world event) and seldom are there any "friends and family" networking stuff happening. If I post a cute pic of my kid, I don't expect my brother to see it and say "my nephew is cute", I expect a honest or sarcastic or angry or jealous discussion, or no discussion at all. The variety of experience reddit provides, is its USP. You can see glimpses of that in Twitter and Insta. A social network pivoted around interests and experiences, rather than friends and family.
  • toto444 5y ago
    There are a lot of dynamic forums out there. Enough for a company (Discourse) to have powering them as their business model. I tend to navigate very niche spaces and I stumble upon forums on a regular basis.
• Skiiing 5y ago
  The lack of a Reddit search engine suits me fine. If I want to use Reddit then I go via Google, visit the page that has the information I need, and RUN. I don't want to spend any more time within the Reddit ecosystem than that. It's a vicious miasma of hate and stupidity. Is there any community on the Internet more susceptible to propaganda than the front page of Reddit? They make boomers on Facebook look like James Randi in comparison. At least Facebook and Twitter actually try and flag misinformation. Reddit actively promotes it, and it's by design!
• randomsilence 5y ago
  Actually they can and only they can. As noticed, once Reddit builds a search engine, people will flood it with spam. But Reddit is in the unique position that they can figure out who is a genuine user. They have the ip addresses of all the submitters and they have the source redditor of each downvote. They can still show the comments from VPNs and such. But for their search engine, they can exclusively rely on using the signals from verified IPs. Instead of building it themselves, they could cooperate with Microsoft and Facebook for the search technology and to know each user even further. Those signals, combined with the downvotes to identify spammers, could create the foundation for Google's nightmares.
• roomey 5y ago
  > One reason for this was the fact that most of the sites back then were indie websites, which did not care about SEO and money and created websites for sharing information. I was around when it started. Let me tell you there was a massive amount of SEO going on back then. The big driver to Google back then was that it was a crawler not directory, so you could get newer results. But most importantly the search was clean and the landing page was empty. All the other search pages were so rammed with crap and asking to install ask Jeeves toolbars. Google was minimal. Webrings were the main way to find indie sites for me anyway. Digg was always good too
• varsketiz 5y ago
  I know of companies that employ hundreds of people to do "webutation" or "guerilla marketing". That involves creating a bunch of accounts on social networks (reddit as well) and posting positive info about their product in relevant places. I have zero confidence in any product review on the internet, if I don't know the poster personally. When I was younger, I thought verifying identity to connect to the internet would be against my rights or something. Now I think this would be great, though probably impossible to coordinate around the world.
• buro9 5y ago
  There is already a great search engine, it is Google. The problem is that it contains an overwhelming volume of spam and auto-generated sites. To solve that, we all use the best search engine and apply site filters. Sites where we know other humans may have already discussed it. We filter for forums - and Reddit is the largest of those - and we filter for specific websites we already trust. Sometimes I filter `site:news.ycombinator.com companyname`, sometimes it's `site:dcrainmaker.com best gps watch`, sometimes it's `site:lfgss.com bottom bracket cable guide de rosa`. But if I don't know about a specialist website, then it's `site:reddit.com searchterm`. The search engine exists, it's just full of garbage with no effective way to search minus the garbage. I'd take another DMOZ, a human curation of specialist sites. Then I'd have something better than Reddit too... I'd have the right filter to make every search useful.
  • yetanother-1 5y ago
    How would you search private forums (subreddits) that you are part of, but not accessible for Google?
    • buro9 5y ago
      I'm already not signed in to Reddit so this already applies. It turns out most forums default to public as that drives organic growth that sustains them over time. There are enough public fora to not have to seek out private ones to answer things.
• stefs 5y ago
  i remember history very differently. the old search engines before google analyzed only page content in isolation, which lead to SEO sites appending invisible blocks of keywords at the bottom or putting loads of barely related keywords in the page title. google was the one that managed to break this cycle with pagerank. suddenly, the spamword filled trash sites were worthless because nobody (of worth) linked to them. on the other hand blogs flourished, because their structure worked well with pagerank. it took a long time for the spammers to re-build their networks and strategies to adapt to the situation, but even then having a well-written and regularly updated company weblog usually did more for your search ranking than other SEO trickery.
  • hanwenn 5y ago
    This. In the early days of Google search, there were lots of other search engines (Hotbot and Altavista come to mind), and they were crap compared to Google.
• spiderfarmer 5y ago
  I sometimes wonder if we would have had very good search engines if one of the Tech Giants invested in a huge amount of manual information entry/organization instead of optimising around spam and junk websites. Like Encyclopedia Brittanica, but on steroids. With 500.000 editors and a couple millions volunteers instead of a couple hundred editors. Google has 135.000 people on staff right now, all very highly paid. They could have a massive advantage if they had their own unique dataset.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    > Like Encyclopedia Brittanica, but on steroids. With 500.000 editors and a couple millions volunteers instead of a couple hundred editors. DMOZ was pretty close to that, but freely available. And Google now has their Knowledge Graph, which is internally curated but largely fed from outside sources including the free Wikidata.
• zeruch 5y ago
  They don't have to. They just have to be a better option to look for acceptable "answers" (and can be acquired even via google anyway, at least for now). The real underlying point is the degradation of Google's default results; manipulation of boolean syntax to filter for certain characteristics and Google becomes a tool to find answers elsewhere rather than from Google's own results directly.
• jdrc 5y ago
  that's just false. I often want to advertise in subreddits but either the mods don't allow anyone to advertise or the reddit ads are really crappy and juvenile. If i could have a spot on the sidebar of reddit search results i d happily pay more than i do for their cpc ads
• asdfsfkwqe 5y ago
  There is a Chinese counterpart/copycat of Reddit --- Tieba. It is owned by Baidu (counterpart/copycat of Google). More introduction can be found here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Tieba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Tieba. Tieba was once popular just like Reddit. Then, the management (of Baidu) figured out how to make money with Tieba and its search engine to promote brand and erase negative comments. Not much people use it anymore. The point in the article is pretty convincing to me.
• voldacar 5y ago
  >So how can we fix the system? The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge, not websites with their primary priority to make ad revenue. Different solution: - Make a search engine that is actually good. Blacklist all SEO spam such as pinterest, allow complex queries, restrict by date, site, regex, etc - Charge 1 cent per search, or as much as is necessary Why has nobody done this? What am I missing? I would totally use this. And if the pricing were correct, you wouldn't need a captcha and could just expose it as an api for bots
  • cowl 5y ago
    >Why has nobody done this? What am I missing? The answer is in your proposal: >- Charge 1 cent per search, or as much as is necessary 90% of people do potentially hundreds of searches everyday. Especially non expert users that practically use the search engine to search for the domain of the sites they need to go too. The people ready to pay a fixed fee /per search wouldn't be able to cover even a fraction of the infrastructure costs of : "search engine that is actually good" Then there is the question of what good means. Google's solution that "outside links" are considered as "votes" that this site is good is what made it good but also what made it vulnerable to SEO. Do you have any other idea on how do you decide if a result is good or not beyond the literal text search?
    • rawoke083600 5y ago
      >Google's solution that "outside links" are considered as "votes" that this site is good is what made it good but also what made it vulnerable to SEO. Do you have any other idea on how do you decide if a result is good or not beyond the literal text search? Exactly this ! I used to be head of search for a big eCommerce site, and even with this very "limited-scope-vertical". I was always amazed at the vast differences between people's opinion on "what are good results" it's so personal and ambiguous most of the time. Even in our small'ish devteam (< 15), there were never 100% consensus on what "query to product-ranking" should be. Doing this at Google scale I can only imagine is x1000 harder
    • voldacar 5y ago
• revskill 5y ago
  SEO tricks is shit to me. The content itself is the SEO. If i were building the search engine, i'll just ignore all nonsense website with their tricks as well as clunky tracking script in their header.
• chaoz_ 5y ago
  Reddit would need strong anti-fraud/anti-spam expertise, because currently most of BlackHat SEO masters are focused on Google. Subreddits with their own moderators can work for the current traffic (and probably 10x that), but the quality of the platform is likely to degrade if reddit received >10% overall google search traffic. I am not saying Reddit can't do that, and I would be really happy to see it happen.
• srmarm 5y ago
  > So how can we fix the system? The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge, not websites with their primary priority to make ad revenue. Which makes it a shame that Google is in the business of pushing ad revenue rather than search.
• sasaf5 5y ago
  > I’d still prefer a targeted ad over a random ad that is unrelated to me. No, a million times no. A targeted ad requires my personal information being collected, and the resulting assumption of my needs may be offensive and even dangerous. I prefer a random ad. Or better, a place where I can just search the product I want in detail.
  • topicseed 5y ago
    A targeted ad can be a contextual ad, with no personal information involved.
  • yakubin 5y ago
    "Random ad vs targeted ad" is a false dichotomy. There are also contextual ads. For example, the audience of Linus Tech Tips regularly gets their fair share of contextual ads delivered by Linus in-band. You're not going to see an ad of a toilet paper on LTT. Instead you're going to see ads of hard drives, Squarespace, online shopping platforms, etc. The ads are the same for all viewers (i.e. definitely not targeted) and don't require any JS spyware. Moreover, LTT (and other creators) get more money from those ads than from YouTube ads. Everybody wins (except Google and Facebook).
    • JSavageOne 5y ago
      Everyone wins except the viewer who now has to manually skip through ads because adblockers don't block those type of ads
      • finger 5y ago
        SponsorBlock might be of interest. > Skip sponsorships, subscription begging and more on YouTube videos. Report sponsors on videos you watch to save others' time. [0] [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-youtube/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaepdhchncahnbgone?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
        • 5y ago
• nathias 5y ago
  reddit is good for customer reviews of nieche products, not much else
• skywhopper 5y ago
  “most of the sites back [when Google was created] were indie websites, which did not care about SEO and money and created websites for sharing information.” This is a very bad misinterpretation of the history. At the time, we’d already passed the inflection point of most websites being just for sharing information (that probably happened in 1995). Traditional search engines like Lycos and AltaVista were being overwhelmed by SEO spam. I remember having given up on most searches for anything remotely commercial. What made Google so revolutionary was that it worked around that with a very different algorithm that relied on incoming links and site reputation. Of course the spammers figured that out soon enough, and Google worked hard to stay ahead of things for a long time. But now what we’re seeing is that Google has captured itself in the SEO game, and the incentives to continue investing in providing a high quality search engine are mostly gone. Google makes money off of showing you ads, and getting you to click on ads, and getting you to use other Google services that show you ads. And the ads they sell are a lot smaller and more tightly controlled search space than the spammy web. And they are more concerned with who you are and what you’ve been up to than what you are actually looking for in the moment. I agree that Reddit won’t be replacing Google as a general purpose search engine, but eventually Google will become so user hostile that alternatives will emerge. It’ll just take longer than we want.
• scher 5y ago
  Reddit search results could be better. For example, it'd be great to search only in comments, or in post titles, descriptions. Now, it searches posts only. The subreddits search shows some relevant subreddits by their names, but the other results aren't valid. E.g. type any search query and there's a high chance that r/teenagers are there too. There could be no fancy algorithms, just give more filters. Meanwhile, people try to build websites around Reddit to leverage their search(what I do).
• Traster 5y ago
  I completely disagree with some of the points here. There seems to be this weird assumption from people that Reddit is some organic source of information that hasn't been polluted by advertisers and SEO. But the truth is that it absolutely has, the difference is that the way you game the system is different. Google is this crazy algorithm and no one really knows how it works, so people just throw shit at it. Keyword spamming, link farms, etc. All this auto-generated content. It's much more difficult to manipulate Google, but as an algorithm google doesn't object to people trying. The result is an obvious explosion of rubbish that raises the noise floor. Reddit is different, they don't have algorithms. They have moderators. You don't need to figure out some crazy complicated way of manipulate things, you just have to either bribe or trick a couple of unpaid part time staff. And we've seen this so many times - moderators who use their position for their own gain. Now the result is different, this is what's misleading. On reddit because it's all manually moderated spamming is heavily penalized. So you don't get the noise floor of rubbish content. What you do get though, is highly unreliable information about anything that could be monetized. It's exactly the same way on twitter, your energy company will be perfectly happy treating you like crap and keeping you on hold for 3 hours, or your airline company will throw your bags into a skip in Timbuktu and tell you you're on your own. But suddenly if you have a following on twitter and complain you get the red carpet treatment. Why? Because they've found a very easy way of cheating their customer service reputation.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    > What you do get though, is highly unreliable information about anything that could be monetized. So it's just like the rest of the Internet. And at least in Reddit (or, more to the point, the newer federated lookalikes - Reddit is dying and losing its highest value and most committed users) you can go look for the tiny niche communities focused around that interest, where users will be better focused on policing insincere content.
    • otherotherchris 5y ago
      They don't exist. Open forums have been dying for the last decade. First they migrated to Reddit, then walled garden Facebook groups, and lately to Discord. Google has also removed a lot of large and active forums from it's index outright, either due to AI bungling of it's core product, anti-competitive reasons, or political conspiracy.
• jaimex2 5y ago
  That could have been an ema... comment.
• jaimex2 5y ago
  Remember when Google said it was going to punish blatant SEO? Must have been April 1st.
• marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I think people give too SEO too much credit. SEO is a big problem as long as there is only one big search engine, with one algorithm. That allows absurd specialization to abuse the idiosyncrasies of that search engine. That's just how it goes with monocultures though. I've had very little problem identifying SEO spam by just not being Google and promoting other values than they do. Since the search engine spammers are very mindful to follow every one of google's best practices, then you can effectively find the rest of the internet by just punishing sites that do not, in some way, follow Google's rules. Unencrypted HTTP? Bring it. Poorly optimized for mobile? Don't mind if I do. Weird looking URL? This is gonna be good! Et cetera etc. You can also weed out a lot of this nonsense by looking at where websites created by humans link. Rarely do they link to spam.
  • bullen 5y ago
    I think Google is over because the problems we have now are harder and harder to google. That combined with stagnation of constructive and/or simple progress, all caused by lack of energy. Means there is less and less you don't know that Google can teach you. I haven't googled anything important since around 2016. Reddit gives you a narrow subject with people that care about said subject, much much better!
    • marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Well there still seems to be a lot of deep content on the web, it's just that google doesn't show you any of it. You may, if you're lucky, get a Wikipedia box. And Wikipedia, for all its breadth, is incredibly shallow on most topics. I submit that the reason you aren't learning anything from google is that it just doesn't surface anything for you to learn from, but usually just the same dozen or so big sites, wikipedia, stackoverflow, etc, and the rest is all spam and ads. If you google "Strongly Connected Components", it shows you a wikipedia page and a few pages with what looks like freebooted content and a bunch of ads. This is a far better resource than any you'll find on Google: https://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Algorithms/MyAlgorithms/GraphAlgor/strongComponent.htm https://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Algorithms/MyAlgorit...
• streamofdigits 5y ago
  Greed killed the golden goose and this article points this out in a simple and convincing way. > The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge This doesn't immediately provide a solution because knowledge sharing does need infrastructure (which needs to be developed and maintained etc.) But as the (relatively) tiny budgets of organizations like wikimedia indicate, if you have the right incentives less might be more. There is room for money to made in the digital economy, lots of it actually, but it will require us to pull the plug on adtech and all the ways it has degenerated. In broad brush we need to cleanly bifurcate into 1) trully free commons and 2) pay-to-play services that respect and are accountable to the client/user
• axiosgunnar 5y ago
  So I can kill Reddit if a build a search engine for it that becomes popular and Reddit users start optimizing for that?
• vault 5y ago
  URL: Reddit can Title: Reddit can't
• ThinkBeat 5y ago
  A lot of "influencers" get paid good money to shill on Reddit. It has a huge social media site. Of course, it is not ignored by the industry. Products, fads and politics. Over the last several years it has become quite infested. All is not lost. There are some really good smaller subreddits. For smaller subreddits who have been around for a long time social meia influencers are easier to spot. Some subreddits are so focused on an obscure niche that it is not worth money to try. Well paid reddit influencers are well trained in "propaganda". One might have several accounts and the information comes "organic" from a "group effort". Some will not even name a product directly but give enough hints. You also have negative influencers that work had to hurt the credibility of others and brand. >Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge. And there is no financial incentive associated with it. They know that do it to share their knowledge.
  • ppod 5y ago
    The structure of reddit really works well for preventing shilling from being a fatal problem. Namespaces moderated by genuine enthsuasists gain more users, and even if they are infiltrated, there is this constant evaluation of subreddits and posts by subscriber numbers and upvotes. It's a darwinian ecosystem with constant speciation and competition among subreddits.
  • ravenstine 5y ago
    I largely blame Reddit's redesign. Once Reddit became more about infinite scrolling with media content becoming front and center, that made it much easier to gain attention through low-effort gifs and memes. It draws in the lowest common denominator of people looking to scroll through mindless content while on break. More eyeballs and more screen real estate means more opportunities to shill and propagandize. Old Reddit doesn't encourage this to the same degree because feeds are mostly composed of titles and thumbnails without infinite scroll or autoplaying media; much less exciting for mindless content consumers but better for those who are genuinely interested in discussions around particular topics. The change in Reddit's design brought in a very different element that also brought more shilling with it, and so many subreddits have turned into glorified meme generators.
• bjarneh 5y ago
  > I was too young to use Google when it first got started, but according to many, in the beginning, Google had better or more accurate search results. I'm old enough to remember when Google came, and the main difference was this: With Google you did not have to flip through 3 pages of completely unrelated search results; that were paid for. Google used to display advertisements on the right as well, i.e. not among the regular search results. This made Google so much better (and more popular) then their competition.
  • 300bps 5y ago
    And now the majority of the first page of results on Google are ads.
    • alphabetting 5y ago
      80% of queries have no ads
      • adventured 5y ago
        Which makes sense, that means they can't fill the inventory for those searches. The majority of queries likely yield garbage these days and or are just searches for things like conversions, definition look-ups, searches for the homepage of gmail or facebook (which is how many older people get back to those places), or people wanting to go directly to a specific page on Wikipedia (knowing that's half of what Google is good for now) and countless other similar searches. It's quite amusing that so much of Google's value is now in being a glorified link generator for Wikipedia and Reddit.
  • alkonaut 5y ago
    The early search engines (Webcrawler, Lycos, ...) ranked "relevance" based on some silly metric like "the more times the search term appears on the page, the more relevant the page must be". So the result was that the first pages were full spam sites that just used search terms as hidden text. Then Altavista came and it was a huge change for the better. They at least made some effort of trying to rank actual relevance. Of course, Page/Brin's invention that made Google what it is today is PageRank, and none of the competition were close to an idea that good. So PageRank'ed pages, good spam detection filters and ads on the side = Good Google. A search engine that stood out against the competition. Now Googlee has horrible site spam detection, shows ads in the main result list (some times it's all you see). Google now has very little edge against the competition. Even just 1-2 years ago DDG and Bing were a lot worse than even the modern day Google. But what should make the search people at google really sweat isn't so much that google has deteriorated a bit, but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par. Google search has never had peers at any point since it was launched.
• naveen99 5y ago
  There is https://redditsearch.io/ https://redditsearch.io/
• api 5y ago
  Kagi is the search engine I'm most excited about. I'm using it as my default now and will pay when it exits beta. The placement of financial incentive at the user should help them invest in combatting spam and returning good results. The results are already pretty solid. Money easily creates perverse incentives in media. The advertising driven model is the easiest to scale. You lose the friction of signups and people don't want to pay anyway. They'll happily blow $50/month at Starbucks but $10/month for media is too much. Unfortunately the advertising model places the incentive around capturing user attention rather than delivering anything useful, so it incentivizes the media equivalent of empty carbs and sugar.
• never_a-pickle 5y ago
  Reddit results are not organic at all but maybe appears to be on the surface. Subs have their own "reddit" brands in accordance to the topic. They also have their own "reddit" opinions shared among almost every sub with enough people in it for justify propaganda. I already did my own informal research on this - reddit has transitioned into consumption. I went sub by sub for thousands of posts, even a few years ago, and found that at least 75% of the selection of hobby subs I chose were related to the consumption of products within that hobby, not the active participation and knowledge translation within that hobby. You'd think camping subs would be talking about camping? Sure, see the sidebar for basic info. However, what you'll really see is 80 of the top 100 posts of the day will be pictures of various products within different backgrounds/settings.
  • valar_m 5y ago
    > Subs have their own "reddit" brands in accordance to the topic. They also have their own "reddit" opinions shared among almost every sub with enough people in it for justify propaganda. Which is actually the cool thing about Reddit, because you can just create your own subreddit about a topic and set the rules as you see fit. Don't like that camping pics have products in the background? Alright, set a rule for your new sub that says no products in pics, and then rule your kingdom with an iron fist. Heck, that could be the whole point of your sub. /r/campingProductFree or something.
    • pydry 5y ago
      This used to work well but moderators have "professionalized" and nowadays will viciously stamp out any kind of separarism. Creating a forum has never been hard. Attracting people is. I would imagine this would get worse as money corrupts reddit the same way money corrupted google. Whomever moderates /r/camping probably isnt doing it for free.
      • valar_m 5y ago
        > This used to work well but moderators have "professionalized" and nowadays will viciously stamp out any kind of separarism. How would they go about doing that? I see new, competing subreddits being created all the time. Like, what could a mod do to stop me if I wanted to create a new competing sub?
• kvetching 5y ago
• quixoticaxolotl 5y ago
  I've searched for Reddit in the past because Reddit is the only site where I can get community answers to an important question. In those cases, the community aspect mattered to me - for example, I recently moved to Boston, so I solicited Bostonian's recommendations from r/boston; my partner and I were having troubles, and I wanted to hear from people who'd gone through similar experiences; I wanted to learn about compiler construction and went looking for other smart folks who were interested in the same topic. I would never do a code search on Reddit. I would never search for "restaurants near me" on Reddit. I would almost certainly never solicit medical advice from Reddit, or type in a new term I'd heard to get all the information about it, or try to shop for things from Reddit links. I just don't think that's what Reddit's for. That's why I find both this response and the original so bizarre in their thesis. Search isn't homogeneous, and, while I have noticed declining quality in a few areas I search frequently, those areas almost never overlap with my Reddit-specific search areas. Reddit wouldn't replace my Google any time soon, even if it built a better search engine.
  • ravenstine 5y ago
    Reddit doesn't replace all of search, but for me it does effectively replace search engines when I'm looking for an opinion. Life is short... I don't have time to weigh all the facts about something and make my own decision. While I do that a lot, when getting started with something, an initial opinion to go on is very useful. Search engines have become really bad at surfacing genuine opinions. Crappy GPT-2 generated blogs have overwhelmed the ability of search engines to surface human generated blogs, and even the human ones are often clearly just someone's hour of research on a topic with the conclusion being "decide for yourself". Sites like Quora make it too easy for someone to insert their opinion without it being adequately tested in the public space. YouTube was once a fairly decent place to hear opinions but, like with regular search, it's currently optimized for the equivalent of low-effort blog posts: videos that are ~12 minutes long with little valuable information. Reddit has many issues, but at least it's still a useful place to find opinions that are also openly tested against their respective subcommunities. The usual blog type content doesn't last long in most Reddit communities without becoming substantially downvoted. If I want to know why people are choosing a particular programming language, for instance, I can do `site:reddit.com why use c++` and actually get some concise and even nuanced opinions. An equivalent search across all sites on a search engine usually leads to long treatises with little value appearing first above the fold. If I couldn't use `site:` syntax on DDG or Yandex, I'd probably go directly to Reddit's own search engine a lot of times. So Reddit wouldn't necessarily replace all of my searching, but it definitely would replace a large portion of it. And I wish that wasn't so. I wish more of what appeared in search engine results could either be Reddit-type content or academic articles as opposed to all the flotsam we get that's somewhere in between those two yet fulfilling the needs of few readers. EDIT: Somehow I forget how I'll also use HN in a similar way, though less often for some reason.
• jmyeet 5y ago
  I just don't agree with this trope that Google is "bad" or even quantitatively "worse". It's almost always based on: 1. Ads in search results. I don't agree with the premise that ads are necessarily bad. Someone selling a thing may be the best result for a search. As long as ads are labelled as such I'm fine with this; 2. Anecdotes. I can match you anecdote for anecdote; 3. Personalization: it depends on what's included but knowing you're in Chicago changes what's most relevant when yous earch for "auto repair shop"; and 4. Astroturfing, content farms and SEO gaming. To me this is the biggest problem and will be forever an arms race. The article touches on this. It's really a product of views (ie display advertising) and clicks (ie affiliate programs) generating revenue and any search engine will have this problem. The lesson you should take from using "site:reddit.com" or "reddit" or any other term to Google search like this is evidence of just how hard search is. The 21st century is littered with the corpses of dead "Google killer" search startups. The article (correctly IMHO) mentions Reddit doesn't get as much attention SEO-wise and that's actually what can make it useful but it misses the main point: there are communities that form around niche topics (eg vacuum cleaners) that are generally resistant to astroturfing.
• petenick 5y ago
  “The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge, not websites with their primary priority to make ad revenue.” The best way to fix the system is to prioritize the best content irrespective of monetization strategy. Search engines should not penalize websites trying to make money. They should penalize spammy websites that add little value but know how to game the system. The degree to which the creator monetizes their content should bear little weight with a search engine that is trying to serve the best content.
  • miikavonbell 5y ago
    I haven't seen much discussions about solving the entire "search sucks" mess by simply introducing rich filtering for the results. The way I see it is that Google is still some weird magic box that throws a bunch of random results out based on some black magic logic. It's beyond my comprehension that there are no filters on any on the search engines (at least I don't remember seeing any). By having some filtering options, such as "No JavaScript", "No ads", "SSGs only", "Page size < 1MB" and so on, search would be much better.
• mhh__ 5y ago
  Either the problem is very hard or reddit's technology culture is crap. If they go public I would not be bullish
• jrussbowman 5y ago
  I built https://www.unscatter.com https://www.unscatter.com using Reddit to source links for the search index. Last year I added Twitter as another source. I don't think it's a "better" search engine. It's a different lens through which to search. Reddit and Twitter are an information source for what people are talking about. This is why I limit my index to articles that have popped in my Reddit/Twitter input in the last 30 days, deleting anything older. I've actually had it up for years now, just don't know what to do with it. Been focused on my career in IT rather than entrepreneurism because well, life. I can say just this morning I saw "Stanytsia Luhanska" pop as a trending term on the front page of Unscatter and at the time mainstream media has not picked up the story of the school being hit by Russian shells. I think over all the quality results still come from Reddit. Twitter often gets gamed and I see content terms pop up in the trending list. However, Twitter overnight (my time, US East) gets a more international flavor with lots of Korean and other Asia Pac country content bubbling to the top during that time because of Twitter.
  • nivethan 5y ago
    Very cool site! Is there a way to get the words in a list instead of a cloud? I am interested in what your thoughts are about being in an echo chamber and getting out of it, but this is a great way to get a high level view of whats happening on reddit.
    • jrussbowman 5y ago
      Right now the terms are available only via the word cloud. I have considered trying to put together an api and also keeping more metrics about each link. For example how many times it's popped up, reddit and twitter users that posted it and which subreddits the post is in. I just haven't gotten around to it. The concern of it being an echo chamber is one of the major reasons I added Twitter and I still look for more sources. For most of Trump's presidency some form of his name was the top trend 24 hours a day. Crypto is another trend, that while it's great for me because I'm interested in it as well, I question if it's really reflective of what the world is talking about. I have considered creating some sub-sites as well to try and dig more. Focusing on subreddits for specific categories, but the Twitter api (at least what I can afford which means free) isn't quite as flexible for doing that kind of thing while staying inside my api call limits.
• silent_cal 5y ago
  I think this is actually a good argument. Once you build a search algorithm then people start trying to exploit it for visibility. It creates a reward system that conflicts with Reddit's voting system that's already there. I just wish Reddit would get rid of all the NSFW content on the site, it makes for a juvenile atmosphere.
• polynomial 5y ago
  tl;dr: • No one can build a better search engine, bc it will just get gamed to show bad results. • Google can't built a better search engine bc they are beholden to ad rev (per Brin/Page's 1998 warning.)
• smrtinsert 5y ago
  They're already aware of it. There's astroturfing, brigading etc. Reddit moderators help a lot, but the community itself points out bots or suspicious accounts. That cleans out a lot.
• syamilmj 5y ago
  Maybe Google should just add an upvote button.
• prima-facie 5y ago
  Let's bring back the old dmoz.org [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
• TimLeland 5y ago
  Reddit may not be able to but using Google to search Reddit works great :). Here is a simple site that you may want to bookmark. Whenever you start to type goo.. just visit https://gooreddit.com/ https://gooreddit.com/
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• fractal618 5y ago
  REDDIT POPULARITY ON GOOGLE TRENDS https://i.imgur.com/oAGwCZc.png https://i.imgur.com/oAGwCZc.png
  • fractal618 5y ago
    COMPARED TO GOOGLE https://i.imgur.com/mEg0z43.png https://i.imgur.com/mEg0z43.png
• brenelson 5y ago
  I definitely agree with this one, that's why I use Google search even though I'm searching for a specific reddit content.
• bradyat 5y ago
  I see reddit as a replacement for the old "forum" search function that Google used to have. It's an easy first place to check and see if someone has information able a very specific niche. An example would be something like the UKVisa subreddit. I want to know if someone else has run into the same issue that I had with the god awful 3rd party visa processing website that the UK have. I'm not able to find that information of Google - the best I can hope for is something along the lines of a general guide for how to process a visa from an immigration law firm. But on Reddit there is almost certainly someone who has run into the exact same issue, as well as others who have been through the process and can answer from first hand knowledge.
• jarrenae 5y ago
  Search Reddit via Google: https://www.searchbettr.com/ https://www.searchbettr.com/
• lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  A lot of people don't use search in Reddit. They'll ask the same questions over and over ("Why is "other" taking all my storage???"). Reddit could make a better search engine than google and it wouldn't matter.
  • bduerst 5y ago
    Yeah, much of reddit's content is repetitive, even so much that commenters will complain about "reposts". If reddit ever built a search engine, it would need to build a graph that would cluster all these repetitive posts. Users would then be able to easily find a previous post before they went on to create their own repost. This would lead to less posts and less avenues for other users to engage, which is counter to Reddit's own model and probably why Reddit doesn't want a search engine that works.
• noncoml 5y ago
  I wonder if is Google the defacto search engine because they actually cannot be beaten or is it because it's virtually impossible for a new player to "scrape" the internet as easy as Google does. Websites, including Reddit, are happy to give all their data to Google bots, but if anyone else tries to crawl them they will get black-listed very fast even if they follow the robots.txt rules.
  • sndman 5y ago
    I lobbied heavily to crawl my company's intranet since our official IT folks would not include the ~10k "grey" (as in unofficial) web servers set up by technical people over the years. So I tried this myself and quickly realized how hard it was. I stumbled upon thousands of devices that had TCP port 80 (and 443) open so I had to devise various ways of removing these devices. By the end of my project, I had run out of disk space so many times it was laughable. And tuning the crawling and the resulting mountain of data was daunting and started to affect my day job so I eventually gave up. A couple of months after my "project", and with enough warnings from IT and our network security folks, our company decided to purchase a couple google 1U servers.
• stiltzkin 5y ago
  Astroturfing alone Reddit is not a good search engine.
• jiveturkey 5y ago
  insightful. Even Amazon can't build a better search engine. Besides reddit, I always now have to use Google to find specific products on Amazon. I can't understand why Amazon doesn't return them. These same products are not discoverable on Amazon by browsing either. But somehow Google is able to catalog them. eg: 'ohto ceramic refill blue'
• lupire 5y ago
  Nice troll in th
• lupire 5y ago
  Nice troll in the URL.
• MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  > once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are now. SEO stuffed websites. reddit already has a search feature. It's garbage, but it does exist. Also, plenty of people already use Google to search reddit. If reddit integrated a Google-powered search feature, would that be a game-changer? I doubt it. What would be the difference compared to if they implemented their own search?
• pyuser583 5y ago
  Reddit organizes information hierarchically. No shame in that.